Default-installed MTA (was Re: MTA virtual provides craziness)

[Adam Williamson]

On Mon, 2013-05-20 at 16:12 -0600, Kevin Fenzi wrote:

> 3. If we ship sendmail/postfix/exim we can keep on as we are now, since
> they can do local delivery out of the box. However, user needs to login
> as root or otherwise check emails for root or configure it to send to
> another email address they check or they are basically in the same boat
> as log only. However, people already might be expecting this behavior. 

There is a notable distinction here: for the case of any kind of
notification system set up to work by delivering mails locally, if we
install a local-delivery capable MTA out of the box, you only have to
anything 'special' in order to *consume* the notifications. They are
always at least generated and delivered; at any point you perform the
configuration, you find all the notifications that have previously been
delivered.

If we were to ship a relay-only MTA, or no MTA, by default, then this
would not be the case. Until you performed the 'special
configuration' (install an MTA or configure the relay-only MTA), the
messages would be lost. Well, the relay-only MTA might queue them for a
while, but I doubt it would forever. Without an MTA, anything that tries
to send mail will just get a fatal error. So you would lose all the
messages that tried to be sent up until the point you actually
configured your MTA.

I don't necessarily think these points are significant enough to merit
shipping a full MTA by default still, but I think it's important that we
have as accurate as possible a picture of all the scenarios.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net